Design and Control of Robotic Highway Safety Markers

Fixed-priority scheduling of variable rate tasks for an autonomous mobile robot

“…The Robotic Safety Marker (RSM) system [2,8,7], poses a new and interesting real-time scheduling problem. The RSM system is a mobile, autonomous, robotic, realtime system that automates the placement of highway safety markers in hazardous areas, thereby eliminating risk to human workers.…”

A real-time model for the robotic highway safety marker system

“…A more detailed description can be found in [25]. The system design is subject to three major considerations: low system cost, high reliability, and timely deployment.…”

“…The global planning approach used in our application stems from cooperative industrial manipulators [21]. The difference is that our design incorporates behavior control where high priority is given to the barrel robots that must travel the greatest distance [25]. Figure 2 illustrates the paths that two barrel robots are designed to follow from one location to their respective destinations.…”

“…Throughout this period, people have presented several practical solutions for their specific applications [23,29,30,27,12]. Our application is the Robotic Highway Safety Marker system [7,25]. The basic idea is to develop an autonomous, robotic, real-time system that automates the placement of highway safety markers in hazardous areas, thereby eliminating risk to human workers.…”

“…The basic idea is to develop an autonomous, robotic, real-time system that automates the placement of highway safety markers in hazardous areas, thereby eliminating risk to human workers. Our solution is especially useful in those environments where a limited number of barrels need deploying and they are moved frequently, e.g., patch a pothole every 100 meters [25]. Figure 1 shows the working field for a system test.…”